Tuesday, 10 June 2014

'All In One Piece' by Jill Murphy, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

Today my
youngest child is twenty-one.It seems a
good moment to look back on childhood, so I put Susie on the spot, asking her to
name a favourite childhood book.

“That
elephant one where the mum gets paint on her bottom,” she said.

I knew
exactly what that was; All In One Piece
by Jill Murphy, first published in 1987 and still very much in print and
selling well.It’s lasted the test of
time for very good reason.Both text and
pictures are absolutely wonderful.

Jill Murphy
knows real families, and her observational humour is spot-on, albeit that the
family happen to be elephants leading human lives.The drama here is on a domestic level, but
none the less exciting or funny for that.Mrs Large has been looking forward to the annual dinner dance all year,
and she wants to look nice for it. Granny is coming to babysit, and she gives the
four children painting to do so that Mr and Mrs Large can get ready in peace.But of course that’s now how it works
out.Luke wants to play with Mr Large’s
shaving cream.The baby plays with Mrs
Large’s make-up, and Mrs Large doesn’t notice ‘until it was too late’.(We, of course, have, noticed what Baby was up to because we can see in the
pictures what’s happening the other side of Mrs Large’s mirror).Laura is clomping about in her mum’s shoes,
and Lester and Luke are seeing how many toys they can stuff into mum’s
tights.And suddenly it’s all too much
for Mrs Large.

“Downstairs
at once!” bellowed Mrs Large.“Can’t I have just one night in the whole
year to myself?One night when I am not
covered in jam and poster-paint?One
night when I can put on my new dress and walk through the front door all in one
piece?”And, oh, we can see in the
picture how very sorry the four little elephants are!But then Mrs Large does sort herself out, and goes off with Mr Large being told that
she looks ‘like a film star’.Mr Large
gallantly tells her that she’d look wonderful to him, even if she was covered with paint.‘Which was perfectly true, and just as well
really’ … because we can see that she’s sat on the paintbox and the bum area of
the back of her dress is a patchwork of paint colours!

One Amazon
reviewer feels that Mrs Large telling off her children is a terrible message
about squashing children’s creativity.Not a bit of it!It is
recognising, and smiling at, the real dramas and tensions in real families, where
love is never in doubt even when people get, understandably, cross.It is a funny book that gives the child
audience the upper hand in knowing what’s really going on.And I think it’s a romantic book that
celebrates parental love for each other in midst of family chaos.

It’s also a
book that for us will be forever associated with repeated holidays in a
particularly lovely spot of the Lake District, where that book lived and was
brought out at bedtime many many times.Place
and people associated with books has a strong influence on how fondly they are
remembered.

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